I will be clear to start that throughout this I’ll be referring to the kintype as “it,” which seems like a separation from myself, but this is me in the traditional way a kintype is, I’m merely describing the “species,” even though I’m by technicality the only “member” of it. Words like cryptid, spirit, demon or entity sometimes put across a general idea of what this kintype is when trying to explain it, but each is incomplete on its own. This is a complicated kind of being, not quite organic, but also not entirely conceptual, theoretically animalistic yet mere physically manifestive of an idea. Cryptid or demon can work under the context of my kintype as a literal being, an individual predator with behavior, regardless of where it sits on the scale from flesh to illusion or beast to strategist. Spirit or entity can work under the context of it as an explicit embodiment of natural phenomena.
Before I can keep explaining the details I probably have to mention the most important part of this kintype, and the main catalyst for confirming it, why I sometimes refer to it and myself as conceptkin: this is autumn. Not as in it’s closely associated with the season; this being is fall, manifest: the earlier dusk and longer nights, strangely bright skies, harvest and hunter’s moons, loom of winter on the wind and rain, from the last cricket chorus to the first frost, and the season of the haunting of vivid memory. That’s what I am. That’s what this kintype is if you were to give that a form and intentions. That’s why I called it a spirit or demon. It’s an embodiment of a force of nature, like a grim reaper. To use the analogy, if someone had a grim reaper as a kintype, they might identify simultaneously as the cloaked skull figure, and the concept of death itself. I am both the lurking cryptid, and the concept of fall itself, and these are (to me) the same thing.
Sometimes I call it an audiophage, a word that pre-existing language allows for immediate comprehension of, especially when introducing the idea of it to people, because of (one of) its (in my mind) most defining traits: This is a creature that eats sound, literally. Not the object or being that produced the sound; the sound itself. For sustenance, it physically consumes noise—environmental noise, music, speech—absorbing it, leaving silence and sometimes rendering the source of the sound incapable of making the same one again. This is how it “eats,” and it consumes nothing else, but it is also a process with an intentional benefit: any sound it consumes, it is able to then mimic, including the qualities of a person’s voice.
I’ve related this kintype (and associated feelings, before I came to understand it) to the Thing ever since I saw the film, and I was never quite sure why. By nature, its body is illusory at most, and not exactly a very fleshy beast, so the supposed body horror aspect of its mimicry confused me. It’s a being I’ve more often described as being made of darkness, mist, fear, night and sound than flesh—flesh and bone and blood would be sixth or lower on that list. I related to the music video for The Wolf by Siamés too, as well as the monsters from the series Gemini Home Entertainment, No-Face, and the grotesques invented by the artist Trevor Henderson. I’ve eventually realized that the body horror part of this kintype is not immediately connected to its vocal mimicry. I don’t pretend to be another person or try to convince others that I am; the copying seems more automatic, without a true strategic understanding of what it is I’m actually doing even when under personal interpretations that this is a creature that knows the moves it’s making.
The body horror aspect comes only as a result of the fact itself that I am a being not by default made of organic material, rather by shadow, fog and constellations: a visually uncomfortable convergence when an attempt is made to be so. Imagine a being normally not organic and alive trying to appear or even become so by pulling into itself shade from the dusk, flickering embers from extinguished bonfires, the scent of cold rain, and the image of arrangements of stars from the night sky. Forming it into a shape and beginning to breathe, then to follow your footsteps exactly in the woods, in derelict ruins, in cemeteries, in your window at night. Tapetum lucidum glowing cruelly as a solar eclipse. Teeth a little bit differently shaped each time. Talk if you want to donate your voice. Do not talk if you want to keep it. It will hear you either way.
I also really like Over the Garden Wall :3
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